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While reading Lorelle’s awesome post over at the blog herald entitled WordPress Wednesday I noticed a blip she mentioned about Mark Jaquith’s Subscribe To Comments plugin. Apparently, Mark has changed the way in which subscriptions are dealt with by default. In earlier versions, Subscribe To Comments would leave the Subscribe Box check marked by default, causing anyone who commented to automatically be subscribed to that blog post. This in turn created an opt-out way of thinking which has been and continues to be a bad practice.

Mark has changed this around and now leaves the subscribe box blank by default, leaving it up to the end users to decide on whether they would like to subscribe to the post or not. A much needed and welcomed change. Mark even set the plugin up so that even those who want to be subscribed to every post they comment on can do so via cookies:

I appear to have misread into Marks’ post as has been pointed out by both Mark and Lloyd Budd in the comments. What really changed with the plugin is the fact that the site admin now no longer has the configurable option of making the plugin opt-in or opt-out by default. According to Mark,

Before: option of opt-in or opt-out with default of opt-in for new installs. After: opt-in only, but with per-user checkbox stickiness. And yes, the change is old — I just have been getting a lot of e-mail about it and realized I never explained the change publicly.

I realize the change is old and the post I linked to was written in April, but because of the way I read into the post, I thought this was something that needed to be brought up due to the ethical nature of the changes that were made.